Business Intelligence (BI) generally refers to a category of software systems and applications used to improve business enterprise decision-making and governance. These software tools provide techniques for analyzing and leveraging enterprise applications and data. These tools are commonly applied to financial, human resource, marketing, sales, service provision, customer, and supplier analyses. More specifically, these tools can include: reporting and analysis tools to analyze, forecast and present information, content delivery infrastructure systems for delivery, storage and management of reports and analytics, data warehousing systems for cleansing and consolidating information from disparate sources, and integration tools to analyze and generate workflows based on enterprise systems. Business Intelligence tools work with data management systems, such as relational databases or On Line Analytic Processing (OLAP) systems used to collect, store, and manage raw data and transactional data generated by enterprise systems.
For example, an insurance company may have a database that includes all of its policy holders and their current account information, including payment history, premium amount, policy number, policy type, exclusions to coverage, etc. These details can be thought of as dimensions along which corresponding measures can be consolidated through operations such as filtering and aggregation, for instance. Business Intelligence tools allow the insurance company to retrieve data from databases and generate reports based upon specific dimensions, measures and formulae thereon.
Business Intelligence tools available today can generate reports from diverse data sources that aid in decision-making. To enable such analysis, blocks of data from different data sources may need to be viewed in relation to each other in a form that allows a user to see trends or to make comparisons, for instance. Data blocks from diverse sources such as HTML files may also need to be combined with traditional analytical report parts to provide a comprehensive view of the data to the users. Many business intelligence tools provide for such composite analytical user interfaces in form of dashboards and composite applications, for example. However, when viewing such data, a user may want to have the ability to change the data context in order to view how the data will be affected by a changing scenario. Thus, there is a need for a tool that enables a user to swiftly change the context in which a collection of data parts are being viewed with a user interaction model that guides and enables the user to drill down into the details and analysis.